We are the blogosphere

19 February 2009

I am sure I am not the
only blogger or reader who sighs each time she hears negative refrains about blogs’
‘worthlessness’ or reads comments about the poor quality of writing in the
blogosphere. There are always going to be those who take a negative or purist stance
when describing blogging. But what has always amazed me is the response of the
blogosphere to disasters, wars and other global crises. Take for example the
following: in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans; in
December 2005 it was the Southeast Asian tsunami, in 2007/08 the Kenyan
elections and the Mumbai bombings, and this year the war against Gaza. The blogosphere has
reacted in a timely and innovative fashion in response to all of these events,
using the most up-to-date technologies available at the time. In the case of
the tsunami, a blog, SEA-EAT (The South-East
Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog) was started to document the disaster as
well as to raise funds. The ‘Help needed’ and ‘Help offered’ sections enabled
ordinary citizens to work together to provide as much support and relief as
possible. SEA-EAT remains an active blog and it has created the necessary
infrastructure to manage and document any other disasters in the future.

Following the Kenyan
elections in December 2007, Kenyan bloggers reacted immediately to the outbreak
of violence, posting hourly reports. On 31 December there was a complete
shutdown of the mainstream media. Erik
Hersman reported: ‘The only way to get any up-to-date news for the past 24
– 48 hours has been through the blogosphere (like Kenyan Pundit, Thinkers Room, Mentalacrobatics), Skype and Kenyan
populated forums (like Mashada). The
traditional media has been shut out and shut down for all intents and purposes.’

Within days, the
online community and blog aggregator Mashada had set up an SMS
and voice hotline calling for people to send in local news and opinions
on what was happening. Ory
Okolloha (Kenyan Pundit) then suggested using Google Earth to create a ‘mashup
of where the violence was taking place’. Nine days later, Ushahidi, ‘a platform that crowd-sources
crisis information’, was born:

‘The Ushahidi Engine is a
platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web
and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way
of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.’

The developers of Ushahidi
could have stopped there but instead had the vision and commitment to realize they
had created an open-source platform which could be used to monitor and document
any crisis, whether natural disaster, war or elections. In November last year
Ushahidi released Ushahidi DRC. As one
of the founders of Ushahidi, Ory Okolloh, explains, it was not easy to ‘localize’
the platform, but one way of ensuring it was taken up locally was to nurture a
local active blogging community, offer timely and quality translation, and
provide a platform that was simple to use.

The Al-Jazeera news
network contacted the Ushahidi team in early 2009 and within days had created their
own War on Gaza site. Although
traditional news media still have a crucial role to play in the provision of
news, bloggers and microbloggers are creating new ways of presenting news, reacting
in a much more timely manner and reporting from a grassroots perspective. They
are also free of editorial constraints, providing a much broader set of
opinions than we can ever get from the mainstream media.